Toward a left-wing theory of a post-Brexit world

Predictions are the central business of political pundits. The problem is what we do when we actually get it right. I’ve previously argued that political and cultural elites ignore the effects of austerity to their own peril, we are beginning to see precisely that: with numerous heads toppling, British politics is emerging as a rather different beast. After an unexpected Brexit victory, complete with mass political resignations and an attempted Labour Party leadership coup, the dust is beginning to settle around the newly empowered Theresa May, who emerged as the only viable leader of a post-Brexit Conservative Party. While notionally a ‘Remain’ supporter, May’s tenure as Home Secretary saw her enforce a series of harsh restrictions on immigrants, international students and asylum seekers, helping to create the political climate so central to successful Brexit vote.

This is not surprising, as the history of debt is an entirely political one, subject to social conditions and class struggle. While neoliberal doctrine enforces this debt-austerity logic as a moral good in and of itself – producing fine, upstanding entrepreneur-citizens – political elites worldwide appear to be getting the message that the rampant inequality this produces is no longer tenable as part of a stable social order. As Britain’s post-Brexit PM, May will recognise that if she wants to create any sense of stability, she will have to address the very real grievances made by pro-Brexit forces of economic insecurity and lack of democratic accountability. But strengthening this popular sovereignty can only politically and ideologically occur through the assessment of who is and is not a British person: if the state is not to crumble under sheer weight of demands, it has to begin racially profiling. The task for Britain’s political class is to determine whose voices they listen to and whose they will diminish.

In short, expect to see the Tories rule as right-wing populists, a Daily Telegraph, UKIP-style government. Ostensibly anti-neoliberal and anti-austerity, but only able to ameliorate capitalism’s brutal excesses through the strengthening of state sovereignty, with a kind of us-and-them politics inherent to sovereignty itself. These are hardly unpredictable developments in British politics, when understood outside of the prism of general elections and reified political culture. Given these shifting political dynamics, the main surprising factor of the Brexit referendum was that it actually succeeded, and that democracy – with all of its contemptible, populist dimensions – actually worked. In real time we were able to see the trajectory of world politics shift – not due the success of Brexit per se, but it becoming a paradigmatic case of global powers embracing sovereignty as a political goal.

I was and still remain anti-Brexit for reasons that it promotes autarky as a legitimate form of governance for the twenty-first century as opposed to the implicit notion in the European Union of nation-states shedding sovereignty in favour of governance and instead attempting to formulate an ideal, democratic society. Despite its extreme failures, some accidental while some inherent in the project – its status as ‘Fortress Europe’ was solidified in response to the refugee crisis – a response to the EU which abandons its democratic tenets of cooperative decision making between nations and instead embraces autocratic ‘love it or leave it’ style politics of nation against nation is one which should give us all significant pause for thought.

Contrary to the doom and gloom predictions of anti-Brexiters, of Britain isolated and alone in the world, several nations have stepped up to offer Britain a post-EU trajectory. Nations such as Australia and India have been very keen to increase their ties with an independent Britain, securing their own access into its markets as well as strengthening bilateral relationships. In framing the Brexit vote as an economic disaster, many commentators have adopted an apolitical economistic framing of ‘good or bad’ which lies at the heart of neoliberal politics, leaving themselves absolutely incapable of explaining why people would vote for a ‘bad’ option. Instead of being an irrational vote or a protest vote, many people actually voted for something, whether it was for democracy, for independence or for ending austerity. However, the result of this ‘for something’, at least for now, is the strengthening of state sovereignty as a political goal, with all the racist connotations it is likely to produce. Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Donald Trump all recognise that Brexit, like any crisis, is actually an opportunity to build new social relations in the world. The problem is that this current trajectory suggests that without a significant subversion of current political trends, Brexit will make the world a whole lot more Trumper.

Nonetheless, my own opposition is meaningless: merely the protestations of an academic as opposed to the actual force of history. The task of intellectuals of the Left is to rescue the political aspect of the anti-Brexit vote that was a firm rejection of neoliberalism, political elites and everything that the present political status quo represents. To do so we have to understand the social history leading up to the vote, understanding the social tensions latent within British society.

Brexit’s victory lay in the unrecognised defeat of the Conservatives in the 2015 General Election, who were mistakenly celebrating a victory that was nothing of the sort. At a mathematical level this was clear: the Tory Party managed to squeak over the line into a razor-thin majority as a result of the most statistically unrepresentative election result in modern history. Cameron, and the Tories in general, took a widespread ‘meh’ as a complete endorsement, and pursued with a series of political calculations that presumed ‘meh’ would be the standard political response of the British public. They vastly overestimated their own political strength. Politically uncaring and economically aspirational, the most that any government could be seen to do for the people would be to guide them through the increasingly harsh world of post-crash capitalism, utilising the violence of the state through internal policing, racist and anti-immigration resentment and a few subterranean foreign wars to shore up internal legitimacy and political homogeneity.

This is Cameron’s legacy, and as Owen Jones beautifully illustrated, it has come crashing down around him. Cameron faced several challenges to social unity, from class warfare to anti-immigration sentiments to two referendums dedicated towards dividing the British identity. On his own terms, he was a recklessly divisive leader. His failure to effectively stymie class resentment – the hallmark of any ‘progressive’ leadership, the kind of ‘one nation’ conservatism which defined Cameron – and his active encouragement of fear of the other – from Muslims from foreign lands to black youths in the heart of the UK – were symptoms of the failure of his government’s austerity utopia. Unable to effectively create any political coalition, Cameron’s government stumbled from one political crisis to another, retaining government in 2015 through sheer inertia.

These are not problems, divisions or issues created by Cameron himself, but rather the evidence of a growing split in the capacity of liberal democracy to function at all. What was so flawed about Cameron’s premiership was that it was singularly incapable of seeing which way the wind was blowing; his appeal to a mythical middle Britain was one singularly out of touch with the post-crash society that his political program produced. This is most beautifully evident in Cameron’s letter to his own county council, viscerally aghast and surprised by the effects that his own austerity has had on frontline services, even in wealthy Oxfordshire.

His own resignation was not just the result of the foolish decision to call an EU referendum, but precisely due to the kinds of politics his government pursued. It is worth remembering that anti-immigration sentiment was not particularly high in the UK prior to the 2010 General Election. UKIP certainly could not accurately claim to represent ordinary people’s views until successful local and European elections years after. It did not help that the Labour Party under Ed Miliband helped legitimise people’s ‘concerns’ about immigration as opposed to addressing the economic conditions lying under these concerns, or attempting to resolve racial tensions through community programmes. The left-liberal anti-racist and anti-austerity consensus – which looked like it could coalesce around Jeremy Corbyn, which remains to be seen – can only react defensively to this new reality.

It is increasingly worthless to make predictions in today’s idol-toppling politics. The Left lacks any consensus narrative surrounding Brexit. Is it more likely to empower despots and racism, or is it a rupturous moment that breaks through this neoliberal consensus? The capacity for theory itself is becoming increasingly redundant. If Owen Smith eclipses Corbyn as the Labour Leader it might well be a positive development, as a final abyssal break with the post-war political institutions which precipitated the global political, economic and ecological crisis. Or the left might have lost one of its final institution bastions to connect it with ordinary people. But if Corbyn does win, will this merely ‘channel back discontent into the traditional structures of power’?

Yanis Varoufakis’s political project of reviving European democracy will certainly regard the enthusiasm for Brexit among the far-right as a grievous blow, yet it might harden his personal political gamble that democrats need to coalesce around the European Union if they do not want to be overrun by the right’s agenda. But is the EU even salvageable? Why save it from itself when we need to transcend it eventually? Some truths do deserve to be rehashed: our crisis is international. As Slavoj Zizek argues, the for-or-against Brexit debate is a false narrative: ‘socialist nationalism is not the right way to fight the threat of national socialism’. All our various theories about the importance of one struggle or another are in the end somewhat meaningless without the potential for a radical, transcendent movement to arise. Without this, the capacity for the Left to theorise about contemporary political issues is in jeopardy, as all predictions circle around the fact that there are no dominant Left political actors capable of blasting these false choices apart.

Politically speaking, austerity was a failed response to the crisis produced by neoliberal capitalism in 2008: without any successful consolidation, it is fair to argue that the bourgeoisie have lost political power and the people have won. It was Brexit which succeeded and Cameron who resigned, his political career an abject failure. Yet in terms of ideology, austerity was successful in entrenching neoliberal norms deep into society, such that the only effective political response has been when the populace has lashed out in violent spectacles. Again: it was Brexit, not class conflict, which managed to genuinely upset global politics to a remarkable degree. With two competing losses: the bourgeoisie of political power, and the proletariat of any kind of class formation, the time has never been better for Left intellectuals to fill in the gaps.

We now live in the extraordinary time in which anything is possible, and yet every brief pocket of hope is inexorably surrendered to right-wing extremism or – at best – centrist dogma. This will continue until the Left is capable of delivering an effective form of political praxis beyond blogging and sloganeering – this article notwithstanding. We live in the world that is, not the world that we want. The Left’s role is not to actualise the latter in the shell of the former, to impose our vision of what the world should look like. It is instead to unleash the unseen potential of social forces in ways we cannot ordinarily predict. The Left is unique in its ability to reshape the world. Let us remember why it exists, and not succumb to the myopic worldview of fascists and their accomplices.

Comments

Hi. This discussion has surfaced through a few social media outlets so if it is ok I’ll just post what Ive already posted. In particular my post us trying to build a progressive left consensus post Brexit and as such trying to articulate the flaws of liberalism as seen from a communitarian perspective…..

As I see it, what progressive brexiters (communitarians) and progressive bremainers (liberals) both wanted is deeper democracy and more fairness and justice whether on local, national, regional or global levels. We just had different ideas about how to achieve it. Communitarians felt we needed to leave the unreformable eu neoliberal club to get there and the liberals felt the eu could be reformed in order to achieve these goals.

So the question that arises for me is why are we still unable to create consensus between our progressive camps. What seems necessary is trying to work out our deeper differences with regards the balance between the community good and individual rights.

In this respect, there seems to be a difficulty in that communitarians believe in the management of human, financial and ecological resource flows through community democracy and cooperation in order to create resilience whereas liberals believe in not managing human, financial and ecological resource flows and as such preserving the rights of individuals to express their economic and social freedoms which often results in competitive relations.

However if individual rights are allowed to trump the good of the community then we have the situation which we have now whereby we are forever mediating competitive relations which inevitably results in inequality, frustrations, tensions and the excessive use of resources in order to try and universalise rights fulfillment at standards which are way beyond ecological limits.

It is in this respect that communitarians view human rights with some scepticism since in truth rights cannot be universalised since for example when economic activity creates pollution, even at accepted safety levels then the outcome of one person’s right to a livelihood which invariably creates some amount of pollution, has a negative impact on someone’s right to health and life. Similarly, if, in order to raise someone out poverty, the state adopts a free trade agreement in order to help create employment for this person in poverty in a Nike factory for example, then this additional economic activity contributes to climate change which creates a drought in another region of the world who either die or are forced to migrate due to famine. This points to the fact that not only do we live in an interdependent and interconnected reality but that reality is underpinned by cause and effect relatiinships which are often zero-sum games.

Moreover, the human rights framework, like any other human system, is infused with power dynamics which inevitably means that more rights are given to one section of society over and above another but the rights framework has no way of mediating these power dynamics since to do so would infringe on a person’s rights. For example, you cannot deprive someone of their property even if they have 10 houses in order to give a house to a homeless person. Therefore, according to the rights framework, you have to build another house which then places a further demand on ecological resources. In turn, more resources need to be extracted which then dislocates another rural community in a developing countries through eviction, thus depriving them of their property and livelihood, resulting in a life of poverty in another rapidly expanding city, all because the rights framework does not have the capacity to mediate the distribution of resources fairly and equitably.

This lack of distributive capacity is similarly enhanced by notions of ‘progressive realisation’ and ‘available resources’ which does not compel redistributive measures within the scope of ‘available resources’ or ‘progressive realisation’ but simply restricts the realisation of rights until such time more resources become available hence the ideological need for economic growth. As such the construction of social liberalism and the rights framework that is at the heart of social liberalism demands economic liberalism in the form of economic growth in order to simultaneously protect rights and enable the filfillment of rights. As such the human rights framework from a communitarian perspective is a human ego construction which facilitates inequitable relations between humans and facilitates inequitable relations between humans and nonhumans and as such cannot deliver either sustainability or resilience at whatever scale of human settlement/organisation.

In sum, if rights were truly universalised then everything would have to go into a state of stasis due to the interdependent cause and effect relationship between everyone and everything. Obviously this will not happen therefore so called universal rights can never be universal but will always be relative to power, available resources and progressive realisation which is arguably just how the different Establishments in the world want it.

If anyone of a social liberal disposition disagrees, then I would be interested to know how liberalism and its universal rights framework can actually be realised without negatively affecting another person’s rights and without negatively increasing global resource demands. Similarly, I’d be interested to know how liberalism can bring deeper democracy and fairness when liberalism and the rights framework simply leads to unmediated competition?

In the very likely case that liberalism does not lead to sustainabity and resilience but the overuse of resources then the other side of the coin needs to be acknowledged so rather than castigating communitarianism or populism as simply bad, these ideas need to be acknowledged as possible solutions to the multitude of problems the human species face. Therefore progressive liberals need to acknowledge that communitarianism does have the ability to create deeper democracy, fairness and resilience by allowing communities to decide in cooperation with other communities how to manage human, financial and ecological resource flows for the good of the community as a whole including its environment whether it is a local community,a national community, a regional community or a global community. As such, communitarianism does not focus on rights but focuses on needs so has a needs-perspective as opposed to a rights-perspective and one that is situated within a bioregional u understanding whereby the needs of humans are seem as important as the needs of Nature. Thus communitarianism is an eco-centric perspective that actively seeks to share available resources within the framework of bioregionalism in order to satisfy the sustainabity needs and resilient needs of both humans and nonhumans at all scales of our world ecology.